Panavision Genesis Cost

Max Jacoby · August 3, 2004

I found it inspired me to shot digital HD when he explained how people considered film "Organic", and he replys with "It dont grow on tree's"... lol....

Quite frankly I wouldn't bother with anything Robert Rodriguey has to say. His comments on the past about HD anf film are completely worthless.

Landon D. Parks · August 3, 2004

Quite frankly I wouldn't bother with anything Robert Rodriguey has to say. His comments on the past about HD anf film are completely worthless.

I dont agree. I think Rob makes some pretty good statements about film vs. digital. and you know, I have not seen his "Film is Dead" featurett in which I Plan to watch today.

Its clear you dont like him.. Dont worry, film will still be around in 100 years, but film, in my opinionh will become the way of Indiefilms, and HD will become so expensive, it'll be the way of hollywood movies.

He has always been what I have always wanted to be. A person who is not affraid to try new things, and see how they work. Unlike some, Who just think film is the ONLY way it should ever be and never willing to give video a chance. I know some people are like this.

In my opinion, What will kill film will be the new generation of Cinematographers. As the older film lovers move out, and the newer HD Dp's move in, we will see a BIG increase in Hollywood Productions on HD.

Even thogh Rob atakes film like its hitler or somthing, he still has a point. his "Ham

Story was pretty good as well.

Some like him, some love him, some hate. Just as some Love film, and others hate it to death (Rob and George).

And yet it all falls back on one big issue, the story.

You can have the most beutifule 35mm images in the world, but a crappy story, and see how well it does.

Or a HD feature with a good story that make $100,000,000 + at the box office. (Spy kids 2, 3,)

Bottom line is as I say in my Sig.... Who cares if it was shot on film or hd?... ITs the story that counts.

And I think 97% of the world will agree with me... while the other 3% only go to the films to talk about how bad looking they are.

In the end, no matter which medium you use, you as the filmmaker are required to tell a story, and if the story is not good, then it wont make a scent, reguardless of shot on Hd or Film. The exception is Once upon a time in mexico, which had a terrable story, terrable Cinematography (Due to Rob not hiring someone who knew how to operat the cameras, not the HD medium). But with Depp, story or not, you will make Millions.

Just my Idea about it. So, I dont expect anyone to agree with me, and im not trying to brainwash anyone in to HD over Film, or that you should stop hating Rob. I'll leave that up to the other 3% who have nothing better to do......

Hope these are wise words, Im not trying to make anyone mad here. Just expressing my opinion on it.

I don't understand this statement. What did you expect to see?

I was not expecting to see anything. I was commenting on the fact that HD has more innerds than film cameras. Take apart a Sony HDW-F900 and and Arricam, tell me which has more Circuits, Processors, Wires and the like. Film cameras may be made to a higher quality, but thats not what I was talking about in the first place. My origional post was that HD cameras have MORE STUFF in them , and Film Cameras LESS STUFF, and yet the seem to charge more for Film Cameras.

Not that Film cameras where made to a higher quality and standard than Hd. I have no doubt Film Cameras are higher quality... they are 90% Mechanics, which require more precision and time than Electronics.

Film can be called organic because it does exist in a physical form, and its made from organic materials

Film may be of Physical form, but that does not make it Organic. ITs not made with tree leaves. its made with Chemicals.

And really, Hd DOES have a physical form, the size of the CCD. It just looses that form when recorded.

The big expense in a good film camera is high precision machine work. Most of the innards of an Arri or Panavision camera are held to tolerances of plus or minus one ten-thousandth of an inch. That's give or take a layer of metal about ten thousand atoms thick. Not easy to do, it takes highly skilled and expensive machinists a long time to make a camera movement.

Wow, sounds pretty hard. But I imagin HD has some high standards for design and assembly too. if you get the CCD off alignment AT ALL, the camera is trash. At lease film has 10,000 atoms to work with.

he cost of making chip #2 and onward is in the tens of cents apiece

Come on... CCD's cost more than that. I bet a good HD 2/3" 3 CCD Block would run you $8,000.00 - $10,000.00 each.

My look at it also is like this. What if Digital was what we had for the last 100 years? I bet the minute film was starting to be used, everyone would comment on how bad it looked. We are all just so use to the "FILM LOOK", that we can tell when its not film.But come on, Film is technology, and ALL technologies Die at some point. Do you still use a Phonograph? I doubt it. we have a new technology, called a CD. Even HD will die someday, to make way for a new format.

Again, theses are just my opinion on it. and Im not a DP, So I dont know everything. this is just the way I see it through my eyes as the Director. :blink:

P>S) Sorry for the bad typing, but I'v been up for 2 days straight now, and Im not paying to much attention to how im typing.

David Mullen ASC · August 3, 2004

>You can have the most beutifule 35mm images in the world, but a crappy story, and see how well it does.

>Or a HD feature with a good story that make $100,000,000 + at the box office. (Spy kids 2, 3,)

Or you can have a crappy story in HD. You can have crappy-looking movies with good stories and crappy-looking movies with crappy stories and good-looking movies with crappy stories and good-looking movie with good stories...

I'd hope most us here would want to make good-looking movies with good stories. It's not like we're handed a choice: you've got to make this bad script look good -- or you've got to make this good script look bad. It's a false conflict.

Rodriquez is a smart guy and has some interesting things to say about HD. I don't hate him at all -- I admire him. But you have to take what he says with a grain of salt because, like anyone promoting himself, he talks up HIS method of making movies by EXAGGERATING the problems with the way other people make movies. So he'll take any advantage that HD gives him and run with it, stretching out the truth. Anyone who works all the time with both film and HD can tell you that. I've shot seven features in HD, which is more than Rodriquez has. Of course, I didn't direct and edit them but I'm well-aware of the issues there too.

He doesn't really lie about anything; he simply can misrepresent the issues to his advantage. But the truth is that if he found a way of working that works for him, he should stick to it. However, you should note that half the tricks he uses to make movies faster and cheaper he was doing back when he was shooting on film! I listen to his commentaries on HD and some of them make me want to laugh because he is stretching the truth so much to make him look more clever. But he doesn't really outright lie about anything.

As for being his own cinematographer, that works fine because he is halfway decent at it, not that HD somehow makes him a better cinematographer. I know plenty of directors who couldn't shoot their own movies no matter what type of camera you handed to them. And there's that thing called LIGHTING... But the truth is that Spy Kids 1 looked better than the others, not just because it was shot in 35mm but also because it had a better cinematographer working on it. But Rodriquez does a fine job as his own DP -- he's not as not as good at it as Steven Soderberg though.

David Mullen ASC · August 3, 2004

As for film being "organic" that's just a poetic phrase to describe its look. The look of film compared to digital is like the difference between oils and acrylics in painting. One could describe acrylics as being harder-looking with less depth, but that doesn't mean one can't do some great works of art with acrylics. Or it's like a scupture carved from marble versus one in metal that was poured into a mold.

Film has a random grain structure frame to frame while digital cameras use a fixed pattern of pixels. This creates certain artifacts as the grid interacts or aliases with fine detail in the frame; sometimes it can give the impression of greater sharpness while other times it can reduce sharpness. But this accounts to some degree that film feels "organic."

Sound recording experts have the same feelings about high-quality analog magnetic recordings versus digital recordings. The word "warmth" is probably used the most to describe the difference. Some of it has to do with the fact that digital sound systems were designed by engineers who didn't understand some of the subtleties of the analog world so while they thought they were creating a perfect digital equivalent, they were removing some information that gives a certain depth and warmth to the sound. Some of this has been fixed over the years, reducing some of the "brittle" quality of earlier digital sound recordings. I expect over the years the same improvements with digital images.

John Sprung · August 3, 2004

he cost of making chip #2 and onward is in the tens of cents apiece

Come on... CCD's cost more than that. I bet a good HD 2/3" 3 CCD Block would run you $8,000.00 - $10,000.00 each.

I'm talking about the cost of making an individual chip once you have the mask set and the fab line all set up.

It's the same idea as mass produced DVD's. You spend maybe $50M - $100M making a movie, paying big name actors. That money is long gone and spent by the time you press the first DVD. What Crest or whoever charges you to make the DVD's is something like 50 cents each. You sell them for $15 each because each DVD has to pay for part of that big up-front negative cost.

Chip economics are the same thing. High initial fixed cost, low unit cost once you're in production. Volume is the critical variable. You can see this in computers. Intel microprocessors are cheaper than Motorola because there's a much higher volume of generic Windows/Intel boxes than Apple/Motorola computers.

As for 3CCD blocks, yes, there is a mechanical precision issue in assembling them. But with Genesis a reality, and Arri D-20 close behind, three chip blocks are as obsolete as three strip Technicolor.

-- J.S.

John Sprung · August 3, 2004

HD has more innerds than film cameras. Take apart a Sony HDW-F900 and and Arricam, tell me which has more Circuits, Processors, Wires and the like. Film cameras may be made to a higher quality, but thats not what I was talking about in the first place. My origional post was that HD cameras have MORE STUFF in them , and Film Cameras LESS STUFF,

And most of the "stuff" in film cameras is nice extras that don't really have to be there to make a picture. I have a camera called an Ensign Cinematograph, circa 1895 - 1910. Other than the footage counter disk and ratchet, everything in it is absolutely necessary to moving and exposing the film. When I fixed it up, the closest lens I could find was a Cooke from the 1920's. The test I shot on it was very disappointing. It looked just like it came from a Panaflex.

There is plenty of complexity in the film system, but it's not in the camera mechanism. The beauty of film is that most of the complexity resides in a big factory in Rochester, NY. (Or, IIRC, Yokohama if you buy the stock with green labels instead of yellow.) Perhaps John Pytlak can give us the exact number, but there are upwards of a couple dozen layers, all vanishingly thin, in a modern emulsion.

The beauty of it is that technical improvements in the film system don't make all the cameras obsolete. They happen in the raw stock factory and in the labs.

-- J.S.

Tenolian Bell · August 3, 2004

Take apart a Sony HDW-F900 and and Arricam, tell me which has more Circuits, Processors, Wires and the like. Film cameras may be made to a higher quality, but thats not what I was talking about in the first place. My origional post was that HD cameras have MORE STUFF in them , and Film Cameras LESS STUFF, and yet the seem to charge more for Film Cameras.

Film may be of Physical form, but that does not make it Organic. ITs not made with tree leaves. its made with Chemicals.

And really, HD DOES have a physical form, the size of the CCD. It just looses that form when recorded.

Camera manufacture and cost isn't a race to see who can stuff the most into a box. If anything the goal is to manufacture smaller profile lighter weight camera's. And have you seen the cost of the F-900?

You, your pet dog, cat, or fish are all organic and none of you were made from tree leaves.

HD images don't have a physical form. The CCD is a step in the creation of the HD image, it is not the image itself. You cannot hold a CCD up to light and see pictures.

David Mullen ASC · August 4, 2004

I don't know if the difference between how film records the image and how a CCD does it matters THAT much in terms of one being better than another conceptually (I'm not talking about specifics, where one system may produce a worse image depending on its design and construction).

You are talking about light energy either creating a charge on a CCD or creating a latent image among some silver molecules because the energy has caused a change in the orbits of electrons. The only real difference is that grains are randomly placed frame to frame while pixels are in a fixed pattern.

Remember that the image on the film isn't viewable either until it is transformed through chemical development and the unexposed silver is removed.

In the case of the CCD, the charge has to be transferred to something else, in this case, converted to a series of numbers. So at this point, film remains an "analog" system while digital video has temporarily stored the image as a series of numbers, to be decode later into an analog image. Of course, you can always digitize the film image at some point as well!

Anyway, my point is that both are examples of light energy being transformed into something else, either a pattern of silver molecules or electrical signals to be decoded later into the original image (and you can guess which method is more like our "organic" human vision...). So while one can call a film image more "organic" in feeling, I'm not sure that implies any superiority; it simply describes a textural difference.

Tenolian Bell · August 4, 2004

I'm not sure that implies any superiority; it simply describes a textural difference.

Right I agree I wasn't trying to argue the superiority of one over the other either. It's all semantics really.

I wasn't really talking about the feeling of viewing film vs. digital either. I was just really refering to differences in their physical properties.

HD picture essentially is made up of binary encoded electronic pulses, which could be considered more synthetic way of making pictures.

Which of course is an advatage for HD in many ways in that it doesn't exist in the physical world, it doesn't have the limitation or vulnerability of a physical object. Binary encoded electronic pulses are free to be maniplulated in ways that could never be done with physical objects.

I'm not really saying one is better than the other just that their is a difference.

Tenolian Bell · August 4, 2004

Remember that the image on the film isn't viewable either until it is transformed through chemical development and the unexposed silver is removed.

Right and this deals with carbon based (organic) physical properties.

John Pytlak RIP · August 4, 2004

Perhaps John Pytlak can give us the exact number, but there are upwards of a couple dozen layers, all vanishingly thin, in a modern emulsion.

The beauty of it is that technical improvements in the film system don't make all the cameras obsolete. They happen in the raw stock factory and in the labs.

Yes, some films have over a dozen distinct layers in their emulsion stucture, all with a total thickness less than 0.001 inches (25 micrometers). Some films use "fast", "mid" and "slow" emulsion layers for each color, plus protective top coat, filter layers, and interlayers.

Look at it this way: Kodak makes 12-megapixel color sensors and attaches them to a clear 35mm plastic strip with perforations for easy transport, registration and handling. These sensors sell for less than 4 cents ($0.04) each. B)

Landon D. Parks · August 7, 2004

But you have to take what he says with a grain of salt because, like anyone promoting himself, he talks up HIS method of making movies by EXAGGERATING the problems with the way other people make movies.

I do agree here. I dont think he should put down the way other people make film. if they want to shot on Film, then so be it. It should not be up to him to tell them there process is messed up.

Even while he is doing this though, he has points on how there process is messed up. And how we do things because its the way they where always done.

I do have one question though, what exactly does people talk about when they say "Video look" v. "Film look"?

I just popped in Once Upon a time in mexico and watched it again, and payed close attention to the picture detail this time. and still yet, it looks just like it would have if shot on film to me.

Now if I had a side by side comparison, that may make a difference. but 99.99% of the audience dont have that either, I guess thats why so few can tell the difference between the two, you just got to have a trained eye to catch the differences.

Again, I fall back on what I said: "Its the story that counts". No matter how "Organic" film look, or how "Videoish" Video looks, its all comes down to the story and how big of a cast you are able to assimble. Without a name star and good story, Hd or Film wont get you fare. ;)